Oblivious
by vacant houses
Summary: The death of heroism is not quick and memorable. It's a long, slow process that creeps inside, choking naivety until there's nothing left but the ashes of valor and honor.
1. That which crawls inside

TMNT= Not mine. As always, my turtles are a mix of Mirage, NT and the fourth movie. Inspired by the random thought, "What would happen if the turtles, heaven forbid, ignored the stereotypical scream from a dark alleyway?"

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><p>It didn't come quickly.<p>

Apathy is slow after all; it crept gradually into their souls as every night left them bitterer than the one before. Crushed dreams followed high pitch screams as they repeatedly sought out the worst of humanity and kept it from choking the weak and defenseless. The cycle was endless, interrupt a robbery, bust a drug deal, stop a mugging, leaving criminals tied up and unconscious for the police to find and scratch their heads over.

But it never stopped. Never ended. Sometimes they were too slow, too late, and someone wound up on the cold concrete, bleeding to death. There was a strange morbid fascination at the sight of blood sluggishly spreading across the moonlit pavement, the horrified realization that they had failed again. As it flowed across the ground and cooled in the night's air, something, it could have been hope, purpose perhaps, died along with it.

They had been children when they had started this. Playing hero and going out to save humanity from itself. Full of idealistic dreams and beliefs that they were really making a difference. But the nights grew longer and colder and they collected more battle-scars with every new encounter, both physical and mental. The children that had once believed that they could handle everything the world could throw at them quickly faded away.

The decision was not a conscious act, at no point did they ever actually speak and concur on it, it was a simply a natural development borne of a world weariness that had become far too disillusioned.

One night, four turtles ran across the rooftops.

There was a scream.

They stopped, but it was only for a second, a moment perhaps to acknowledge the people they had once been, the children who would have barrelled eagerly down that alleyway without a moment's delay. Eyes were held for the briefest seconds, heads titled questioning as they listened to sobs and panicked shouts. No one spoke, the moment stretched as they searched themselves for a reason to intercede.

Then, without a word, they gathered themselves up and continued on their run.


	2. Wandering astray

TMNT= Not mine. As always, my turtles are a mix of Mirage, NT and the fourth movie. Shadow is Casey's daughter in the Mirage comics.

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><p><em>"But you were heroes, uncle! Heroes. I did the research; crime rates were lowest the years you were running patrols across the city."<em>

_Her uncle laughed, the sound was flat and unamused, as he stitched the gash on her arm. "But what was the point, Shadow? How long were we going to do this? How long before one of us died for someone we didn't know? Someone who would never understand or appreciate the sacrifice made for them? It's all very nice and heroic and noble to throw yourself in front of a bullet for someone else but what about the people you leave behind?" his thick fingers reached up to tilt her head to look at him, "Your parents will not be comforted by your heroism when they attend a funeral. And neither will we."_

_"It is worth it," she insisted stubbornly, not even flinching as he applied a healthy dose of anti-septic, "Don't you ever think about the people you saved? And the ones that you never did because you stopped?"_

_The turtle's hands stilled. "There were ones that we tried to save but didn't, Shadow. I think about them all the time. You can only watch it so many times before you get tired of it."_

_"You can't expect to win all the time, uncle. And since you've stopped, all you've done is lost."_

_"We're never appointed ourselves protectors of the city or something else ridiculously arrogant. We had the skills and the training and sometimes the situation allowed for something that looked suspiciously like heroism."_

_"How did it start uncle? How did it start for you?"_

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><p>It started like this.<p>

"Here kitty, kitty," Mikey rocked back and forth of the balls of his feet as he peered down the alley. He rummaged through several of the animal's favourite garbage cans to no avail. "Where's that mangy feral flea bag?" He muttered as his search became increasingly worried.

"It's a stray," Raph noted from where he was sprawled lazily on the fire escape above him. His posture was deceptively relaxed; Raph was capable of springing up and onto the defensive in a blink of an eye. A curse of a ninja's vigilance, none of them were capable of fully loosening up on the surface world. "It could be anywhere in the city."

"Not this kitty," Mikey replied, frowning at the distressingly empty alley, "He's always been here at this time."

Raph rolled over, slipping his legs between the railing and peered down at him, "How long have you been feeding this one?" he asked with a slight edge in his voice.

His brother, over the recent months, had developed the habit of checking up and taking care of any stray animal he found when on patrol over the city. Mikey had always doted on Klunk but his new found obsession with strays had left his family baffled and confused. One of his brothers always made sure to come along on these runs but so far no one had managed to come up with any explanation for this change in behaviour despite Don's sudden and very intense research into psychoanalysis.

Mikey scowled back at Raph, "Don't you remember this place?" he asked, sullenly kicking a trash can. He placed his bag of pet-food on the ground and drummed his hands impatiently over a dumpster then lifted the lid.

Raph raised an eye-ridge and considered their surroundings, "There any reason I should?" he asked.

"We were here two weeks ago," Mikey informed him, searching through the dumpster.

"We were?" Raph frowned down at his brother in confusion.

"You don't remember? You were bleeding to death," Mikey said, from the depths of the garbage heap. "It was great. You, me, stuck down here, those idiots with the guns. Lots of fun."

"Oh those assholes," Raph said amiably as he finally remembered, "I was out for most of that."

"I know, I was the guy handling your stupid, confused butt. Oh, hey, a used condom," Mikey crawled out of the dumpster and shut the lid carefully.

"So where did the cat come in?" Raph asked, leaning forward against the railing as he calmly surveyed the alleyway he'd almost died in a few weeks ago.

"I found Chester after I took those idiots down," the words were so spoken casually, it was almost chilling the way they spoke lightly of death and murder, except their brotherhood had been washed with lifeblood many times over, birthing a strange, macabre humour.

"Two weeks and you already know his personal schedule," Raph gave a low whistle, "Been busy br-is that dog food?"

Mikey glanced down at the bag at his feet. "Er, yeah?"

Raph eyed his brother suspiciously. "I thought you said this was a cat."

"Ah!" Mikey exclaimed as one of the trash cans he hadn't touch gave a sudden shudder and a small creature crawled out. "Hello Chester!"

"That's…a dog," Raph said accusingly.

"Yeah, so?" Mikey pulled up an upturned lid and started to pour dried dog food into it.

"You called him kitty."

"He looks like a cat okay!" Mikey protested, gesturing to the animal. "I thought he was a cat the first time I saw him and it stuck."

Raph leveled a flat glare at the back of his brother's bald head. "That's a dog Mikey," he repeated carefully, hoping that this time it would sink past Mikey's thick skull. "A dog. Barks, goes woof-woof. No meows."

"He looks," Mikey said grandly, gesticulating impressively at the animal, "Like a cat. Take a good look at him bro. Does he not have a distinctive feline cast to his features?"

His brother gazed disbelieving at him then glanced over to the creature in question. It was a mangy mix breed and of no particular pedigree and it looked like a…no, that was ridiculous! Mikey's firm insistence had somehow transmuted itself into his brain and was screwing up his eyes!

"That…can't be right," Raph growled weakly at last.

"I think he's a mutant," Mikey said, leaning against the alley wall, "The secret cat empire accidentally leaked some mutagen somewhere and he came into contact with it. Maybe if I feed him enough, he'll eventually grow into Scooby Doo."

There was an odd look in Mikey's eye, a distant wistfulness as he watched over his small charge. Raph shifted awkwardly, Mikey's eyes flickered up to meet his and for a moment their gazes were locked as Mikey stared almost...hauntingly up at him. Words bubbled to Raph's tongue as a glimmer of understanding began to blossom with him. He could almost feel the answer to this strangeness in his brother's tired face.

Then it slipped away as a gun-shot exploded through the air. They both flinched, Raph instinctively shot to his feet and almost took off but the weariness in his soul seemed to hold him in place. He glanced down at his brother, Mikey had not moved, only hunched closer to the strange little dog; the sad, forlorn look in his eyes was stronger now.

"You didn't go and save the day, Nightwatcher," Mikey noted without surprise.

Raph gave a dismissive shrug though there was a cold feeling crawling around inside him which he knew Mikey could see clearly, "There…didn't seem to be much point," he mumbled helplessly.

Mikey tilted his head, considering his words, "No, I suppose there isn't," he said with a wry humor, "There's no end to it after all. We don't exist to the big bad world so it's not like it's going to make a big difference."

There was no bitterness in his words. They fell silent and watched Chester chew on the dry dog food. Several more gunshots roared through the air. The dog calmly crunched away at his food and there was something almost soothing about the scene, a relief that they weren't in danger, that one of them wasn't going to be harmed or killed, that it wasn't their problem and they weren't going to make it their problem and responsibility.

That the only thing they needed to do was sit and watch the dog. It was simple. It was easy. It felt good to let the weight slide off their shoulders and narrow their world away from things that really had never been their concern.

Mikey, Raph realised with a jolt, had stopped looking at humanity with shining adoration. The turtle who once thrived on attention and approval and held hopes of one day proving himself to the human race and gaining acceptance had turned to devoting his time and energy on stray animals. A more simplistic but perhaps more appreciative group for his efforts.

When Chester was finished, Mikey stirred and shuffled the slightest bit closer.

Chester snarled and backed, vanishing into the cover of rubbish bins and garbage bags.

Raph glanced carefully at his brother; he was unsurprised by the animal's action, a resigned look on his face.

"There some asshole punks who like to come down here and I've seen them beat up on him," Mikey explained as he gathered himself up. "He'll let me feed him but he's never going to let me get close."

But though he didn't show it, Raph knew Mikey was hoping that he'd one day be allowed close enough to touch the small mangy animal.

A week later, Chester vanished from the alleyway and they never saw him again.


	3. Decisions, decisions

TMNT= Not mine. It's waay too long. I blame Tauni for encouraging me to write about giant robots instead of turtles. But the muse is thankfully unbiased when it comes to writing. As usual, I'm blending Mirage, the 2003 series and the fourth movie together, though I wasn't intending to draw on the fourth movie quite so much in this chapter. Also. The new review button is horrendous. Someone change it, PLEASE.

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><p><em>"You look good. For a person with a fractured shoulder, a broken arm and a damaged knee, anyway."<em>

_She laughed painfully. "Don't lie. I look horrible."_

_"Ever gonna slow down kiddo? I've never seen Casey so pissed off and terrified when we got the news. At this rate, you're gonna give your old man a heart attack."_

_"Terrified?" she snorted, "Dad doesn't get scared. And what's he so angry about anyway? It's nothing he hasn't done before."_

_"Maybe when he was younger and stupider. Now he's started to wise up and he realises just how easy it to lose someone."_

_"Why is it different for me?"_

_"What?"_

_"You went and hunted them down, didn't you?"_

_The turtle shrugged dismissively. "Assholes needed to be taught a lesson."_

_"It happens all the time. But you won't do it for anyone else. A man got killed two streets away from Second Time Around but you didn't go after his killers. What's different about me and some other person?"_

_"Family's important, Shadow. Humans have the opportunity to go out and make connections with whoever they want. But us, we only have you guys. We can't afford to lose anyone."_

_"That man had a family."_

_"I can't be everywhere. And I can't save everyone."_

_"I know why uncle Mikey spends so much time taking care of stray animals. And I've seen the helmet in Splinter's room. What happened to the Nightwatcher? What killed him, uncle?"_

_"Nightwatcher died the moment he was a fucking idiot and tried stabbing his own brother. That's what happened. He was also an asshole who ran off and let his family fall to bits. Bastard like that needed to be laid to rest."_

_"You abandoned the people who used to hope that the Nightwatcher would save them."_

_"They didn't have a fucking right to expect a thing from me. It was a human problem and humans should have taken care of it. I gave them two dedicated years of my life. We gave them more than that. We were overly generous. And you know what? I would have rather just spent it all soaking up the time I had with my family. Only gonna live once, kid. And I'm done with wasting my time for people who are never going to give a damn."_

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><p>It started like this.<p>

He stared at the newspaper article. This…didn't make sense. His eyes numbly traced the print on the paper. No. He couldn't understand it. He refused to let the meaning of the words sink into his brain. Didn't want to let it in. Couldn't.

His mind turned in circles. The words floated away and returned, trying to penetrate the thick barricade of denial. Eventually he slipped up and the information rushed into his brain.

They had released that fucker.

Raph didn't even know the bastard's real name; the man went by a lot of aliases and no doubt this was one of them. Jeremy Howard. He sneered as he read the article again. Yeah right. A man like him practically begged a ridiculous crime-lord name,

He'd spent a good majority of the last two years hunting the bastard down. Shaking down the local thugs and sweet talking the street kids had eventually yielded a location and it took a further two months of stake-outs and surveillance before he even had a game plan for taking the man down.

What a night that had been. He'd gone in, loaded with as many ninja tools as he possible carry and proceeded to kick-ass to the max. The slaver had been caught and hauled away to prison for a very long time presumably and he'd thought that was the end of the story.

Evidently not.

Raphael levelled a glare at the newspaper, pushed himself away from the table and stalked into the dojo. Memories of frightened, starving refugees, kept in ridiculously crowded quarters rose up in his mind. He had a punching bag to kill.

Frustration and confusion drove his blows. What was he supposed to do? He'd laid the Nightwatcher to rest, gave Master Splinter his helmet and his bike was sequestered in a corner of the garage that no one wanted to look at, a painful reminder of the darkest two years of their lives. And he intended to keep things as they were. He knew himself too well. If he blew the dust of the helmet, geared up and went after _Jeremy_, telling himself it would be a one off thing, he'd be back there every night before he knew it.

That plan didn't hold the appeal it once had. Things were going good for his family for once, things were quiet of the Foot side of things, Leo was home and Raphael found that he was actually relaxing and enjoying his life. Shattering the peace for his messed up sense of justice felt…wrong.

But the thought of sitting around and doing nothing while the slaver walked free repulsed him to the very core. In some twisted sort of way, he felt that he was responsible for dealing with the criminal. Which was stupid. That was the job of the human's legal system.

"Someone you know?" Leo leant against the dojo's door, holding the newspaper out.

Raphael pulled away from the bag and glared. "Fuck off," he ground out.

Leo proceeded to ignore him and entered the room. "What did he do that brought the wrath of Nightwatcher down on top of him?"

"Human trafficking," Raph hissed, folding his arms and backing up. "And they've dropped all the charges and just let him go free."

His brother stopped and studied him carefully. "Do you want us to go after him?"

That gave Raphael pause. "Say what?"

"Us. You. Myself. Our brothers. You know, _us._"

Raph narrowed his eyes and gave Leo a deadpan stare. "Stop being a smart-ass," he growled. "Yes. No. I don't know what I want to do about him. He was the Nightwatcher's business and I don't want us to get mixed up with him."

"But you don't like that he's getting away unpunished," Leo observed as Raph returned to mauling the punching bag.

"A whole lot of peoples' lives just got a lot more miserable," Raph grunted. "And I don't know the solution to this. Where does our responsibility end, Leo? We drag the criminals to the cops; they're out on the street a month later. We can't keep hauling them back in."

Leo made a soft sound of agreement and for a few long minutes, the only noise in the room came from Raphael's fists. "While I was in Central America," Leo began eventually, "I protected a small village from the local militia. It was isolated, completely cut off from any form of government, no one else to enforce the laws and protect the villagers from those brutes but me."

"And now you're here," Raph muttered.

"And now I'm here," Leo agreed dispassionately. "It was massacred five months ago. No survivors."

Raph stopped and glanced up at his brother, completely startled. "Holy shit," he said in horrified shock. "Leo, jeez-"

"It wasn't in the news," Leo replied bitterly. "I didn't even know until April came up and mentioned it to me. The militia declared that the village harboured a rebel group and wiped them out. The government will reward them for murdering innocents. All those months spent protecting them, gone. And you know what Raph? Maybe if I had stayed, they'd still be alive. And maybe you guys might have been killed and the world could have gone to hell if I'd done that."

Raph swallowed and turned his face away from his brother's unnervingly blank gaze. He wanted to give assurances, _they'd survived this much insanity, nothing's ever going to happen to them_, but the realist in him laughed at those words. He remembered that night of the fight, running away from Leo after breaking his swords and then turning, seeing the stone generals surrounding his brother's fallen body. Leo had been completely defenceless and vulnerable then. The only thing that had saved him was the deception Winters' generals had planned. And if they hadn't gotten involved, the portal might have never been closed and the world would have been overrun by monsters.

"There isn't an answer to it," Leo said quietly, "All we can do is decide what's our higher priority at the end of the day and hope that it's the right choice and that no one suffers for it. Whether we want to come home to our friends or family…or keep the good fight going and risk having nothing at all."

Leo stepped back as Raph headed for the door, yanking the newspaper from his grasp. Raphael read the article again as he stormed through the living room, eyes narrowed in anger before trashing the paper and throwing himself onto the couch. There's the bitter feeling of failure coursing through his body but Raph forces himself to let it go.

"Get Don and Mikey and popcorn," he growled. "We're watching a movie. Something with lots of explosions and doesn't require brain-cells to follow. Maybe we'll go after him another night."

"Maybe?" Leo asked, from the dojo's doorway.

"Maybe."


	4. Failing, falling

Herp derp. I should have finished this chapter ages ago. All my chapters have actually been sitting half written on my laptop for a year now. Unfortunately, I'm still no closer to figuring out the second half of the last chapter as I was back then. This chapter was brought to you by DeeMG's prodding whilst I was writing stories about giant robots. So yeah. Be sure to thank her. This is the second last chapter of this fic and we're almost at the end...

Anyway. TMMT = Not mine.

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><p><em>"You were lucky tonight."<em>

_"Yeah, I realise. Can we just go home now?"_

_"No. We need to talk."_

_"Oh goody, you're going to lecture me?"_

_"What are you doing Shadow?"_

_"I'm doing what you taught me. You showed me what the world is really like. I can't turn away from it; I can't go home and ignore it. Not when you've given me the power to change it, you taught me how to fight."_

_"We taught you how to defend yourself. But maybe…it was a mistake to take away your innocence."_

_"Uncle if I die out there, promise me you'll take up the good fight again."_

_The turtle paused and studied her. "No."_

_She gaped at him, then raised her fist in anger, "How can you-"_

_He calmly caught her fist. "Raph and Mikey say you've been asking questions. If you don't die doing something stupid in the next couple of months, you're going to stop by yourself."_

_"I won't stop. Ever," she promised defiantly._

_"You're already slowing down Shadow. This is the first time this week you've been out. And you've started to question yourself, wondering when it's going to stop, whether you're making a difference. I was in your position fifteen years ago, except I didn't have a commitment to getting through school or faced the possibility of getting a criminal record. It'll end faster for you. Trust me, this is how it starts. You can only do things over and over again before they lose their meaning."_

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><p>It was a beautiful day.<p>

Donatello gazed blankly down at the simple headstone, clad in a long trench coat. There were words inscribed on the chunk of marble but the haze surrounded the mutant's brain deliberately stopped them from sinking in. He didn't want to know the human's name. The name of his mistake. The name of his guilt.

Slowly, he unrolled the newspaper in his hand and read the feature article over, eyes skirting over the one detail he was omitting. According to human press, the young man had been killed in a mugging gone wrong.

It was true.

And yet it was false.

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><p>It had been an accident really.<p>

The fight was over; he'd taken down the muggers and stopped to take stock of the situation. His mind was dosed up with adrenaline, muscles tensed in preparation for more combat just in case anyone else came to join the fight. Every part of his trained body hyper-alert, primed and ready for anything.

Then there was the touch.

One cautious human hand reached out and brushed his elbow and he reacted. A lifetime of training and violence had honed his reflexes; he pivoted around, striking out with his bo. When he determined his assailant had stopped moving, he relaxed slightly.

It was after several long minutes of silence, of stillness as his body wound down from its combat ready state that it occurred to him that the alleyway was too quiet. There was no panicked breathing, only the slow deep breaths of the unconscious muggers. The silence crept down his shell, paralysing cold and horrifying because it was just too _quiet-_

He turned and there was a young man, the one he'd set out to rescue. But the picture was wrong, the man lay on the ground next to a dumpster, head bent at an unnatural angle and there was blood-

Too much blood. Red and thick and it pooled beneath the man's body-

There was a moment of blank incomprehension. Then came the horror. The realisation that the man had tripped as he went down and hit the back of his head on the dumpster and it was all so very wrong, the angle was wrong, why-why was the angle so damn wrong?

He took a half step towards the body and stopped, his brain was awhirl with panicked thoughts and every piece of medical knowledge he'd ever read and the certainty that he _could not fix this_.

His hands froze in mid-air as he reached down to do something, anything that could possibly make this right and then the cold logical side of his brain kicked in and he backed away. He couldn't fix this, right here and now and by himself and touching the man would leave fingerprints that would raise questions.

It took him only a couple of minutes to place the call from a phone booth. He didn't wait for the sirens; he launched himself up onto the roofs and ran.

And he didn't stop. As his feet pounded on harsh tiles and concrete, he wished that he could just forget what he had done and the further away he got meant that it hadn't happened.

It had been an accident.

It had been a mistake.

But it had happened.

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><p>It was a beautiful day.<p>

Donatello turned away from the headstone. There was nothing for him here, no one to absolve of his crime, to judge, condemn or punish him. There was the grave and the uncomfortable knowledge that something had gone wrong with him. The constant battles had shaped them, sculpted them into dangerous combat machines and it was getting harder from them to switch back to normal, to relax and stop treating everything as a threat. How much good could they do if they couldn't even tell the difference between enemies and victims?

This wasn't what he wanted.

The turtle backed away. They couldn't continue like this. This wasn't the life he wanted to make for himself, it had gotten out of control and he was going to go insane if he kept it up. He'd made a mistake and Donatello absolutely refused to make another one.

This wasn't what he wanted at all.


End file.
